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‘[Malcolm] Gladwell devoted a lot of time to C.T.E., and argued that universities “should not be in the business of encouraging young men to hit themselves over the head.”’

A debate about banning college football took place at NYU last Tuesday.

[Buzz] Bissinger and Gladwell won in a romp. Before hearing the arguments, audience members were asked their opinion, and 16 percent were for the resolution to ban college football; 53 percent were against. At the end of the night, 53 percent were for it and 39 percent against.

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… [Jason] Whitlock said college football was the “highest level of the melting pot,” uniting people from varied backgrounds in a common cause (“the poor and the rich, the black and the white, the Jews and the gentiles”). Bissinger later playfully challenged him, “If you can name four Jews who played football, you win the debate.”

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More here.

You can sort of see why the good guys won. The other side was smart enough to avoid most of the classic character-building bullshit you hear in defense of college football, but this left them with few arguments.

“If you believe in freedom, you can’t have the ‘free’ without the ‘dumb,’ … They go hand-in-hand. Freedom allows us to do dumb things… You can put football with cigarettes, alcohol, and porn.”

Well, that’s just fine and pretty and fine and just the sort of thing we want hanging around our universities.

Margaret Soltan, May 10, 2012 8:41AM
Posted in: sport

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3 Responses to “‘[Malcolm] Gladwell devoted a lot of time to C.T.E., and argued that universities “should not be in the business of encouraging young men to hit themselves over the head.”’”

  1. Brett Says:
    May 10th, 2012 at 11:17AM

    Whitlock’s argument there is a kind of superficial libertarianism and not particularly convincing, I agree. And why in the world would you call college football a melting pot and list different groups it brought together without memorizing a few names representative of those groups? Unprepared much?

    But the counter — that universities aren’t places where we want to not only accept but empower and encourage dumb behavior the way we accept, empower and encourage football — could have some unintended consequences. Far more students abuse alcohol than play college football, and it can have just as negative an impact, if not more. If the target for banning is cretinous and cretin-inducing behavior, serious crackdowns on student drinking need to be in the mix as well.

  2. Alan Allport Says:
    May 11th, 2012 at 6:16AM

    I just watched the debate online and was surprised just how one-sided it was. It turns out that repeating “Hey, this is America!” over and over again for two hours is not much of a rhetorical tactic.

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:
    May 11th, 2012 at 7:03AM

    Alan: LOL.

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